The Boy Scouts of America have long ceased to speak the language of Christian or Jewish or solid old Roman virtue. They, like the schools, have veered away from any of the specifics of expertise, like teaching boys how to shoot a rifle or how to find edible plants in the woods, or, from my March 1, 1911 issue of Boys’ Life, the first issue ever printed, how to drive cattle across the outback of Australia.

There was only one reality that kept them reasonably sane when all the world around them had gone quite mad, and that was the boy. And now that one reality has been forgotten.

There’s one word in that official statement that is conspicuous by its absence. It’s boy. The word appears in the name of the organization, just as young, men, and Christian appear in the name of the YMCA, even though that organization is now largely a consortium of secular day-care centers and health spas for middle class families and the elderly. The Boy Scouts of America are apparently no longer about boys.

I am aware that girls are admitted to some of the Scouting programs for adolescents. That doesn’t change the nature of this abandonment. For if the Boy Scouts of America had remembered that they were, first of all, the Boy Scouts and not the Youth Scouts, they might just have remembered also the realities of sex – that is, of being a boy, and not a girl, or a neuter.